Long Island Migrant Labor Camps: Dust for Blood

The little-known history of the Suffolk County camps where migrant workers lived in squalor during and after WWII—includes photos.   During World War II, a group of potato farmers opened the first migrant labor camp in Suffolk County to house farmworkers from Jamaica. Over the next twenty years, more than one hundred camps of various sizes would be built throughout the region. Thousands of migrant workers lured by promises of good wages and decent housing flocked to Eastern Long Island, where they were often cheated out of pay and housed in deadly slum-like conditions. Preyed on by corrupt camp operators and entrapped in a feudal system that left them mired in debt, laborers, whether Jamaican or Mexican, Polish or Chinese, struggled and, in some cases, perished in the shadow of New York’s affluence.   In this book Mark A. Torres reveals the dreadful history of Long Island’s migrant labor camps from their inception to their peak in 1960—and their steady decline in the following decades.   “I urge folks to read this book.” —Fire Island News